Easy. X is some number much, much higher than they currently make. If they made $80 billion dollars last year (just picking a number out of a hat since I have no time to look up better figures), then X could be $200 billion. When they make $90 billion the next year (increasing profits), there's a $110 billion "gap" that they blame on piracy.
My theory regarding their "losses from piracy" has always been that they decide they should earn X billion dollars a year. Then they earn Y billion dollars during the year, where Y is less than X. Obviously, by RIAA-reasoning, piracy costs then (X - Y) billion dollars. Of course, they set X so high that there is no way they can attain it and they dismiss all other factors such as a bad economy, poor music selection, rise of indie titles, competition from other entertainment sources (e.g. video games, DVDs), etc. The one and ONLY reason for not reaching their randomly chosen, too-high-to-ever-reach X billion dollars a year goal is piracy!
I use 2 external, 1TB hard drives. All of my photos are backed up onto the first hard drive. That hard drive is then backed up to the second hard drive which is stored "off site." This way if one hard drive dies or is stolen/destroyed, we still have the other one.
If we're not counting a Print Screen or some kind of exported copy as a crack then a much simpler solution would be for Facebook to include a "Expire Image On" feature. Leave the date blank and the image stays forever (or until Facebook is shut down, whichever comes first). But enter a date there and, once that date is reached, the image would be no longer accessible.
Like the X-Pire service, this would be vulnerable to a Print Screen or some other export system. However, an Expire Image On feature wouldn't require DRM or the installation of a plug-in to work.
I, too, performed a study using funds from Microsoft with no-strings attached. These giant metal rope-like things? Oh, those are chains. But they are most certainly *NOT* strings!
Exactly. I'm reminded of one of my CS professors in college. One day he told us that everything he was teaching us would be obselete by the time we graduated, but the concepts and general skills we learned would serve us for years. He was right. I haven't programmed a line of code using C (No ++, sharp or anything else) in years, but the basic C concepts that I learned can be extended to just about any programming language.
It's actually worse than them hurting their own kids. They are potentially hurting other people's kids who can't get the vaccine because they are too young, have immune system problems, allergies, etc. If you can't get the vaccine, you usually rely on herd immunity to protect you. But thanks to Jenny McCarthy, Andrew Wakefield and the like herd immunity is breaking down in places. Parents who would vaccinate their children are having their babies die before they reach vaccination age.
Example: Dana McCaffery, a 4 week old baby, died of Whooping Cough in 2009. She was too young for the vaccine. Herd immunity should have protected her but anti-vaccination groups lobbied for parents to stop vaccinating and suddenly whooping cough rates rose. The head of one of these groups (the Australian Vaccination Network), Meryl Dorey, said "You didn't die from it (whooping cough) 30 years ago and you're not going to die from it today." This was *IN RESPONSE TO* Dana's death. Not just in response to it, but with Dana's parents in the room! She had the gall to question the diagnosis having never seen any of the medical information, merely because it went against what she believed to be true about Whooping Cough and vaccines. Luckily, Australia has taken action against the AVN, but this won't bring back Dana or any of the other babies who die of Whooping Cough, measles or any of the other diseases that shouldn't be making comebacks because we have perfectly good vaccines for them.
And also her supporters would also know that the orginal gunman was the only "bad guy" and wouldn't start shooting each other mistaking those people for gunmen intent on harm. Also, they would have all been perfect shots as well, not missing and hitting the innocent bystanders right next to the gunman. Also, they definitely wouldn't misidentify someone reaching into his coat pocket to pull out a black camera to take a photo of the congresswoman, thinking he was pulling out a gun and deciding to "take him out" before he hurt anyone.
Yes, if everyone there been armed as well, the gunman *might* have shot less people had but other people might also have been shot/killed thanks to the other armed people at the rally who meant well.
The poster said that "stupid parents" not vaccinating their "stupid kids" would improve the gene pool. The implication here is that the improvements would be made by removing the "stupid kids" from the gene pool. I was pointing out that many of the victims of the anti-vaccination movement aren't kids of non-vaccinating parents but babies/children/elderly who just happen to pass within disease transmission range of these kids.
Non-vaccinated child sticks his hand in his mouth and wipes it on his shirt. Then he picks up a box in the store which the parent puts back. You come along ten minutes later (never having seen them) and pick up the box. As you put it in your cart, your child touches it. Congratulations! They've been exposed and might now die! All because Wakefield faked a study and a playboy bunny said vaccines are bad for you.
This isn't natural selection at work. This is parents inflating the risk of a very safe medical procedure and deflating the risk of a very dangerous disease and then putting the results of that bad risk assessment on other peoples' kids.
If it was only their kids at risk, I might agree with you. But when a parent doesn't vaccinate their child, they put OTHER people at risk too. Perhaps a baby is too young for the vaccine or perhaps there's a valid medical reason why the child can't get the vaccine (allergy, immune system issue, etc) or perhaps the person in question is an elderly adult whose immunity has worn off (it does happen). In those cases, the parent not vaccinating their child could cause another baby/child/adult to get sick and even DIE! That's not improving the gene pool, that's randomly firing a gun off into the gene pool and shrugging your shoulders at the result.
Don't think it happens? Tell that to the parents of 4 week old Dana McCaffery who died of whooping cough because immunization rates were too low to provide herd immunity. http://www.danamccaffery.com/
Two things with more mercury than the flu shot (the only remaining vaccine containing mercury): Breast Milk and Infant Formula. Obviously, we must ban formula and breasts as well. Sure, our kids will starve, but at least they won't be autistic!
I think people have some much time, effort and rage involved in blaming vaccines that they can't allow the cognitive dissonance of accepting the idea that it may have all been a waste of time. Time that could have been spent actually helping their children and looking for the real cause and a cure.
Exactly. It's the same effect seen in Nigerian Scam victims. You can admit to yourself that you've been conned and have lost ten thousand dollars, or you can send another thousand and be sure that your millions will arrive. Put people into that situation and most will do anything to avoid facing the cold, hard reality that they were conned and will, instead, buy the ever bigger, ever more complex conspiracy theories that keep them from their goal. (Be it the fourteenth customs hold up keeping them from their money or a vast conspiracy of virtually every doctor, researcher, and investigative journalist on the planet keeping Wakefield down.)
Actually, there's not a lot of money in vaccines. You give someone one shot, maybe a booster or two and they're done. If this was solely Big Pharma Out For Money, we wouldn't have vaccines and instead would need to take our daily dose of Polio-B-Gone X... Three times as effective as the original Polio-B-Gone... Nevermind that it is just a small tweak and that the original was going to go generic any day now...
Actually, it would be an awful argument for perpetual copyright. Suppose that Twain's estate decided that they didn't like the N-Word in the book and that all future editions should bear "Slave Jim". They are the copyright holders (Twain himself being long dead). They could make sure that the only prints available are sanitized copies. Yes, you would still have older versions but these would be harder and harder to find (and more and more expensive) until everyone just broke down and bought the cleaned-up version of Huck Finn. Publishing an original text version would be a copyright violation and would get the publisher quickly shut down... all to enrich his decendants. (Ok, I know Mark Twain doesn't have any living descendants, so this would enrich People Who Happened To Inherit Or Purchase The Copyrights To His Works.)
Knowledge of nasty history can be very valuable. Take the controversy over vaccines, for example. Some of the folks who lobby against vaccine use try claiming that the diseases they prevent aren't really that bad. If you have a sanitized version of history, you wouldn't know that people died, were permanently disfigured or were permanently disabled by diseases such as measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio, etc. Modern parents (including myself) don't have first-hand knowledge of these horrors so they might look at Sanitized History and wonder why they should use vaccines if things weren't ever so bad. Then, when vaccination rates drop and the diseases make a comeback (which is happening in some areas), children will get sick and die.
I'll admit that no historical account is ever 100% objective, but I'd rather have an honest-as-possible recording of history than a Scrubbed-Clean-With-Bad-Stuff-Replaced-By-Rainbows-And-Unicorns version.
Technically speaking, the mirror could have been left by an unmanned probe. Of course, all the rest of the evidence points so overwhelmingly towards the Moon landing being fact and not fantasy. (The Mythbusters did an expert job at busting the various "proofs" that conspiracy theorists give.) I'd say that the biggest knock against the conspiracy is that it would have required thousands of scientists, politicians, engineers and various government officials to keep the secret for over 40 years now. Plus the others that would have been involved in the subsequent Moon landings. (We did go more than once.) When have you known that many people to keep a secret that big for that long a time?
Actually, I'd argue that the XKCD comic proves realityimpaired's point. For most of the comic, the message is to just ignore the Young Earth Creationist and let him be with his beliefs. It is only when it is shown that he might impose those beliefs on others ("But he's a US Senator!") that the message changes.
Rules for behavior tend to change when a person acquires power over others. If I believe that the world is 6,000 years old (I don't, but let's say I did for the sake of argument), it wouldn't matter at all to you. You could go about your entire life not being impacted in the least (beyond, perhaps stumbling across an online comment or two of mine). If I was a Senator, though, I could influence science funding based on my notion that the dinosaurs were wiped out by the Great Flood a few thousand years back. This could, in turn, lead to negative impacts in many people's lives.
Senators should ideally put their religious views aside when making decisions that affect others not of the same faith. Of course, that's not realistic. Still, I'm of the opinion that ideals are what you should strive towards while realizing you may never reach them. If government officials merely considered what people with different religious beliefs (including no religious beliefs at all) might want, it might lead to better policy.
In our case, it was because we were seeing behaviors that might have indicated Aspberger's. The psychologist we were seeing decided that an IQ test was in order and he determined, thanks to the high score, that Aspberger's wasn't likely and the behaviors were instead due to a high IQ coupled with panic attacks. I don't think kids should regularly get IQ tested, but in cases like this, it can be useful for figuring out what is going on with a child and how best to cater to that child's needs.
Side note: We're not seeing that psychologist anymore since he tried treating the panic attacks with medicine. The meds made my child stop panicking but lowered his inhibitions to the point that he did some dangerous things merely because they popped in his head. (Running into the street, for example.) So the psychologist treated him with more meds to control the first meds side effects. When that didn't work and the psychologist went for different meds, we decided to take him off all the meds and find someone else.
My older son is in the 2nd grade and is gifted (IQ somewhere around 140). Right now, they're learning simple addition. There's only one problem. He already learned this last year. He was doing complex subtraction with my wife (a teacher) over the summer break. But the class is doing simple addition so that's what he's stuck on.
It gets worse. They're using a so-called "spiral curriculum" this essentially means they learn one way of figuring out that 8+3=11, then learn another way, then a 3rd, 4th and 5th way. My son gets it the first time, yet he has to sit through all of the other ways. He yearns for more advanced math. He asked me about multiplication and division and, when I showed him an example using Legos, he got the concept right away.
He already knows his times tables up to 5 and wants more. But school is boring to him because they don't push him. He isn't being challenged at all. He tends to act out when he's bored too which makes everything more complicated. If you have a child who is falling behind in school, there are resources to help them catch up. If you have a child who is gifted and wants to pull ahead, your kid needs to sit down, be quiet and learn for the fifth time what 8+3 equals.
While I'll agree that the current crop of electric and hybrid cars are too expensive to pay off their cost (unless you keep them a long time), it is a step in the right direction. Electricity might be produced at pollution-causing power plants, but these plants are 1) more efficient and 2) a lot easier to put pollution controls on (being that there are fewer of them) than the millions of small internal combustion engines rolling around. (Plus, there's other pollution that gas powered cars indirectly cause such as gas being burned by trucks delivering gas to the stations.) I think electric cars are the future. We just need to wait a bit for the prices to drop before they're more economically feasible.
I wish I could charge my neighbors across the street from me for honking their horn. They have people stop by at 10pm or 11pm to pick someone up. You'd think at that hour of the night they'd walk up to the door or use a cell phone to call to say they're there. Nope. They honk. Loudly and repeatedly. And they'll keep honking until the person they're waiting for comes out. Extremely annoying.
Look into the Roku ( http://www.roku.com/ ). It streams Netflix, Hulu Plus and Pandora among others. (Total number of channels is over 100 now, though many of them, though many of them are niche.) They're constantly adding new channels. Thanks to the open SDK, anyone can write a channel (assuming the person knows how to code, of course).
There's no DVR functionality but there is a channel which supposedly streams from media servers on your LAN. (I say "supposedly" because I haven't tested this one out yet.) Plus, at $99, it's quite reasonable.
I have no connection with them beyond being a satisfied Roku user.
Slashdot Mirror
Easy. X is some number much, much higher than they currently make. If they made $80 billion dollars last year (just picking a number out of a hat since I have no time to look up better figures), then X could be $200 billion. When they make $90 billion the next year (increasing profits), there's a $110 billion "gap" that they blame on piracy.
My theory regarding their "losses from piracy" has always been that they decide they should earn X billion dollars a year. Then they earn Y billion dollars during the year, where Y is less than X. Obviously, by RIAA-reasoning, piracy costs then (X - Y) billion dollars. Of course, they set X so high that there is no way they can attain it and they dismiss all other factors such as a bad economy, poor music selection, rise of indie titles, competition from other entertainment sources (e.g. video games, DVDs), etc. The one and ONLY reason for not reaching their randomly chosen, too-high-to-ever-reach X billion dollars a year goal is piracy!
I use 2 external, 1TB hard drives. All of my photos are backed up onto the first hard drive. That hard drive is then backed up to the second hard drive which is stored "off site." This way if one hard drive dies or is stolen/destroyed, we still have the other one.
If we're not counting a Print Screen or some kind of exported copy as a crack then a much simpler solution would be for Facebook to include a "Expire Image On" feature. Leave the date blank and the image stays forever (or until Facebook is shut down, whichever comes first). But enter a date there and, once that date is reached, the image would be no longer accessible.
Like the X-Pire service, this would be vulnerable to a Print Screen or some other export system. However, an Expire Image On feature wouldn't require DRM or the installation of a plug-in to work.
I, too, performed a study using funds from Microsoft with no-strings attached. These giant metal rope-like things? Oh, those are chains. But they are most certainly *NOT* strings!
Exactly. I'm reminded of one of my CS professors in college. One day he told us that everything he was teaching us would be obselete by the time we graduated, but the concepts and general skills we learned would serve us for years. He was right. I haven't programmed a line of code using C (No ++, sharp or anything else) in years, but the basic C concepts that I learned can be extended to just about any programming language.
From what I've seen, I wouldn't laugh at Perry.
Curse you Perry the Platypus!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_the_Platypus
It's actually worse than them hurting their own kids. They are potentially hurting other people's kids who can't get the vaccine because they are too young, have immune system problems, allergies, etc. If you can't get the vaccine, you usually rely on herd immunity to protect you. But thanks to Jenny McCarthy, Andrew Wakefield and the like herd immunity is breaking down in places. Parents who would vaccinate their children are having their babies die before they reach vaccination age.
Example: Dana McCaffery, a 4 week old baby, died of Whooping Cough in 2009. She was too young for the vaccine. Herd immunity should have protected her but anti-vaccination groups lobbied for parents to stop vaccinating and suddenly whooping cough rates rose. The head of one of these groups (the Australian Vaccination Network), Meryl Dorey, said "You didn't die from it (whooping cough) 30 years ago and you're not going to die from it today." This was *IN RESPONSE TO* Dana's death. Not just in response to it, but with Dana's parents in the room! She had the gall to question the diagnosis having never seen any of the medical information, merely because it went against what she believed to be true about Whooping Cough and vaccines. Luckily, Australia has taken action against the AVN, but this won't bring back Dana or any of the other babies who die of Whooping Cough, measles or any of the other diseases that shouldn't be making comebacks because we have perfectly good vaccines for them.
And also her supporters would also know that the orginal gunman was the only "bad guy" and wouldn't start shooting each other mistaking those people for gunmen intent on harm. Also, they would have all been perfect shots as well, not missing and hitting the innocent bystanders right next to the gunman. Also, they definitely wouldn't misidentify someone reaching into his coat pocket to pull out a black camera to take a photo of the congresswoman, thinking he was pulling out a gun and deciding to "take him out" before he hurt anyone.
Yes, if everyone there been armed as well, the gunman *might* have shot less people had but other people might also have been shot/killed thanks to the other armed people at the rally who meant well.
The poster said that "stupid parents" not vaccinating their "stupid kids" would improve the gene pool. The implication here is that the improvements would be made by removing the "stupid kids" from the gene pool. I was pointing out that many of the victims of the anti-vaccination movement aren't kids of non-vaccinating parents but babies/children/elderly who just happen to pass within disease transmission range of these kids.
Non-vaccinated child sticks his hand in his mouth and wipes it on his shirt. Then he picks up a box in the store which the parent puts back. You come along ten minutes later (never having seen them) and pick up the box. As you put it in your cart, your child touches it. Congratulations! They've been exposed and might now die! All because Wakefield faked a study and a playboy bunny said vaccines are bad for you.
This isn't natural selection at work. This is parents inflating the risk of a very safe medical procedure and deflating the risk of a very dangerous disease and then putting the results of that bad risk assessment on other peoples' kids.
As I typed the comment, I wondered if that was Huck of Tom, but didn't bother double-checking. Boy is that embarassing.
I know, I'll release my Sanitized To Remove Embarassment Comment:
There. Now forget all about the un-sanitized verson. It never happened.
If it was only their kids at risk, I might agree with you. But when a parent doesn't vaccinate their child, they put OTHER people at risk too. Perhaps a baby is too young for the vaccine or perhaps there's a valid medical reason why the child can't get the vaccine (allergy, immune system issue, etc) or perhaps the person in question is an elderly adult whose immunity has worn off (it does happen). In those cases, the parent not vaccinating their child could cause another baby/child/adult to get sick and even DIE! That's not improving the gene pool, that's randomly firing a gun off into the gene pool and shrugging your shoulders at the result.
Don't think it happens? Tell that to the parents of 4 week old Dana McCaffery who died of whooping cough because immunization rates were too low to provide herd immunity. http://www.danamccaffery.com/
Two things with more mercury than the flu shot (the only remaining vaccine containing mercury): Breast Milk and Infant Formula. Obviously, we must ban formula and breasts as well. Sure, our kids will starve, but at least they won't be autistic!
Exactly. It's the same effect seen in Nigerian Scam victims. You can admit to yourself that you've been conned and have lost ten thousand dollars, or you can send another thousand and be sure that your millions will arrive. Put people into that situation and most will do anything to avoid facing the cold, hard reality that they were conned and will, instead, buy the ever bigger, ever more complex conspiracy theories that keep them from their goal. (Be it the fourteenth customs hold up keeping them from their money or a vast conspiracy of virtually every doctor, researcher, and investigative journalist on the planet keeping Wakefield down.)
Actually, there's not a lot of money in vaccines. You give someone one shot, maybe a booster or two and they're done. If this was solely Big Pharma Out For Money, we wouldn't have vaccines and instead would need to take our daily dose of Polio-B-Gone X... Three times as effective as the original Polio-B-Gone... Nevermind that it is just a small tweak and that the original was going to go generic any day now...
No, it would be like Huck to trick someone else into white-washing America's racist history for him.
Actually, it would be an awful argument for perpetual copyright. Suppose that Twain's estate decided that they didn't like the N-Word in the book and that all future editions should bear "Slave Jim". They are the copyright holders (Twain himself being long dead). They could make sure that the only prints available are sanitized copies. Yes, you would still have older versions but these would be harder and harder to find (and more and more expensive) until everyone just broke down and bought the cleaned-up version of Huck Finn. Publishing an original text version would be a copyright violation and would get the publisher quickly shut down... all to enrich his decendants. (Ok, I know Mark Twain doesn't have any living descendants, so this would enrich People Who Happened To Inherit Or Purchase The Copyrights To His Works.)
Knowledge of nasty history can be very valuable. Take the controversy over vaccines, for example. Some of the folks who lobby against vaccine use try claiming that the diseases they prevent aren't really that bad. If you have a sanitized version of history, you wouldn't know that people died, were permanently disfigured or were permanently disabled by diseases such as measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio, etc. Modern parents (including myself) don't have first-hand knowledge of these horrors so they might look at Sanitized History and wonder why they should use vaccines if things weren't ever so bad. Then, when vaccination rates drop and the diseases make a comeback (which is happening in some areas), children will get sick and die.
I'll admit that no historical account is ever 100% objective, but I'd rather have an honest-as-possible recording of history than a Scrubbed-Clean-With-Bad-Stuff-Replaced-By-Rainbows-And-Unicorns version.
Technically speaking, the mirror could have been left by an unmanned probe. Of course, all the rest of the evidence points so overwhelmingly towards the Moon landing being fact and not fantasy. (The Mythbusters did an expert job at busting the various "proofs" that conspiracy theorists give.) I'd say that the biggest knock against the conspiracy is that it would have required thousands of scientists, politicians, engineers and various government officials to keep the secret for over 40 years now. Plus the others that would have been involved in the subsequent Moon landings. (We did go more than once.) When have you known that many people to keep a secret that big for that long a time?
Actually, I'd argue that the XKCD comic proves realityimpaired's point. For most of the comic, the message is to just ignore the Young Earth Creationist and let him be with his beliefs. It is only when it is shown that he might impose those beliefs on others ("But he's a US Senator!") that the message changes.
Rules for behavior tend to change when a person acquires power over others. If I believe that the world is 6,000 years old (I don't, but let's say I did for the sake of argument), it wouldn't matter at all to you. You could go about your entire life not being impacted in the least (beyond, perhaps stumbling across an online comment or two of mine). If I was a Senator, though, I could influence science funding based on my notion that the dinosaurs were wiped out by the Great Flood a few thousand years back. This could, in turn, lead to negative impacts in many people's lives.
Senators should ideally put their religious views aside when making decisions that affect others not of the same faith. Of course, that's not realistic. Still, I'm of the opinion that ideals are what you should strive towards while realizing you may never reach them. If government officials merely considered what people with different religious beliefs (including no religious beliefs at all) might want, it might lead to better policy.
In our case, it was because we were seeing behaviors that might have indicated Aspberger's. The psychologist we were seeing decided that an IQ test was in order and he determined, thanks to the high score, that Aspberger's wasn't likely and the behaviors were instead due to a high IQ coupled with panic attacks. I don't think kids should regularly get IQ tested, but in cases like this, it can be useful for figuring out what is going on with a child and how best to cater to that child's needs.
Side note: We're not seeing that psychologist anymore since he tried treating the panic attacks with medicine. The meds made my child stop panicking but lowered his inhibitions to the point that he did some dangerous things merely because they popped in his head. (Running into the street, for example.) So the psychologist treated him with more meds to control the first meds side effects. When that didn't work and the psychologist went for different meds, we decided to take him off all the meds and find someone else.
My older son is in the 2nd grade and is gifted (IQ somewhere around 140). Right now, they're learning simple addition. There's only one problem. He already learned this last year. He was doing complex subtraction with my wife (a teacher) over the summer break. But the class is doing simple addition so that's what he's stuck on.
It gets worse. They're using a so-called "spiral curriculum" this essentially means they learn one way of figuring out that 8+3=11, then learn another way, then a 3rd, 4th and 5th way. My son gets it the first time, yet he has to sit through all of the other ways. He yearns for more advanced math. He asked me about multiplication and division and, when I showed him an example using Legos, he got the concept right away.
He already knows his times tables up to 5 and wants more. But school is boring to him because they don't push him. He isn't being challenged at all. He tends to act out when he's bored too which makes everything more complicated. If you have a child who is falling behind in school, there are resources to help them catch up. If you have a child who is gifted and wants to pull ahead, your kid needs to sit down, be quiet and learn for the fifth time what 8+3 equals.
While I'll agree that the current crop of electric and hybrid cars are too expensive to pay off their cost (unless you keep them a long time), it is a step in the right direction. Electricity might be produced at pollution-causing power plants, but these plants are 1) more efficient and 2) a lot easier to put pollution controls on (being that there are fewer of them) than the millions of small internal combustion engines rolling around. (Plus, there's other pollution that gas powered cars indirectly cause such as gas being burned by trucks delivering gas to the stations.) I think electric cars are the future. We just need to wait a bit for the prices to drop before they're more economically feasible.
I wish I could charge my neighbors across the street from me for honking their horn. They have people stop by at 10pm or 11pm to pick someone up. You'd think at that hour of the night they'd walk up to the door or use a cell phone to call to say they're there. Nope. They honk. Loudly and repeatedly. And they'll keep honking until the person they're waiting for comes out. Extremely annoying.
Look into the Roku ( http://www.roku.com/ ). It streams Netflix, Hulu Plus and Pandora among others. (Total number of channels is over 100 now, though many of them, though many of them are niche.) They're constantly adding new channels. Thanks to the open SDK, anyone can write a channel (assuming the person knows how to code, of course).
There's no DVR functionality but there is a channel which supposedly streams from media servers on your LAN. (I say "supposedly" because I haven't tested this one out yet.) Plus, at $99, it's quite reasonable.
I have no connection with them beyond being a satisfied Roku user.